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Galactic Civilizations II takes place in the distant future, when mankind has become a space-faring civilization and must contend with other extraterrestrial powers for domination of the galaxy. Stardock has released a v1.3.1 retail patch to address a few issues that came up after last week's patch.

Stardock has released Galactic Civilizations II v1.31. Last week's release of 1.3 included a ton of new features, gameplay tweaks, and re-balancing. But in the hundreds of changes crept in a handful of annoying bugs that got past us.

Those bugs included a mini map display bug that caused repainting issues on DualCore machines, an annoying change to how ships were selected when they left orbit (not reported by users but trust us, it was annoying), the hot key support of deleting would crash the game if you deleted something that wasn't there, planety quality not matching the user selected bonus, and a food bonus tile exploit.

There were also a few AI tweaks to make them handle money even better based on reading people's posts on the forums on some of the tricks they use to maximize their economy.

Version 1.3:

This new version of Galactic Civilizations II is dedicated to PC gamers everywhere who have ever bought a game, really liked it but after some months of play had put together a list of things they wish were tweaked or altered but knew would never be because the developer had long since stopped making new updates.

Galactic Civilizations II v1.3, like our other updates, is designed to add new features and make changes based on player feedback. While there are "bugs" fixed, many of them are ones we introduced during our own beta process. Our goal was to do an update that went through and tweaked and changed those little things that would help make the game more enjoyable and give it new life.

Here's what is new over v1.2:

- AI will play harder in campaign at lower levels (AI was designed to be somewhat nerfed on the early missions of the campaign to give players a gentle introduction.

- Various improvements to the Terran Alliance and Arcean AIs.

- Made some tweaks to show ships are designed such that even if they prefer to build ships with a particular weapon system, they will also bear in mind what types of weapons they have already researched (i.e. they may WANT to put beam weapons but if they only have Laser I but have Black Hole Generators for mass drivers it'll still build Black Hole Generators on their ships rather than just tossing a bunch of lasers on a ship simply because they prefer beam weapons at that point. It did this before but now it has a better algorithm)

- Terran Alliance based AI players will put early priority on factories as the first thing to build rather than star port.

- AI players will not go to war for military reasons unless they have enough military forces to deal some immediate pain.

- Colony lights on dark side significantly enhanced. Now based on population and uses a smart algorithm to fit the land masses. There's a ton of changes associated with this, it's probably overkill but it's been on our list for awhile to make the city lights on planets look better.

- NEW! Diagonal Edge scrolling for those who prefer to use edge scrolling instead of using the left mouse button to grab the screen and move it.

- fixed beta 1 memory bug caused by loading save games (save games saved with 1.3 beta 1 cannot be fixed and you should delete them)

- the tech dialog that is brought up by right clicking on a tech in the trade screen or in the maximized tech tree viewer will now accurately list techs that become available when researching the selected tech. Also, the headers in this dialog will now only show up if they have something

- fixed random crash when starting/loading new game from within a game

- planet and ship list entries are no longer created as the planets and ships are restored from the save game

- Made it so that if you played as one race and then started a new game as a new race, the previous race did not have the expected intelligence.

- Changes in values to planetary improvements and starbase modules

- Starting population now 8 billion on the home planet

- Morale on home planet gets a 20% bonus

- fixed first turn after load zero production behavior!

- AI better at managing colonies

- More difficulty levels: Dunce at the lower end, Godlike and Ultimate at the higher end.

- AI intelligence levels above and below "Intelligent" adjusted in difficulty (so i.e. Normal will be tougher than it was because there's a new easier difficulty level and Incredible will be easier because there's two higher difficulty levels).

- The overall difficulty levels have now bee tweaked to have a 1 to 1 relationshipo with the AI intelligence levels so "Challenging" means all AI intelligences set to "Bright" rather than a weighted overall value. Many higher level players would find that they set the difficultly level to Crippling only to find that 2 or 3 of the players would be set to "Fool" (and do very little) while the others played very well.

- Difficulty setup screen tweaked to work better.

- changed size of TriStrontium so that it's bigger than TriStrontium2; previously the definitions were identical.

- fixed error in translation code for raceconfig (homeworld)

- fixed error in translation code for UP issues.

- fixed bug that reset the cheater's flag, allowing cheater games to be submitted normally.

- fixed some exploits in raceconfigs for metaverse games

- fixed missing image in Rename Ship dialog

- fixed error in AbilitiesBonus.xml file that didn't show 20% bonus to Loyalty

- reduced the Custom Race's default value of Loyalty to 15% so that it would not cause negative ability points

- added code to clear the planet/shiplist between games so that it wouldn't keep old pointers (should prevent a memory leak and potential crashes due to bad pointers)

- made it so that you can select a race by clicking on its icon on the Foreign Treaties screen

- made it so that the seleted planet or ship in the planet/ship list is saved so that changing the sort variable or filters will still keep the selection.

- added code to let you right click on a tech to bring up the tech description dialog when the tech tree window is maximized

- fixed error where fleets of ships could still attack freighters protected by galactic privateer

- Reversed direction of the moon revolution (yes, Earth's moon now rotates around the Earth the right way)

- added a check in the Direct 3D code for vertex and pixel shader versions

- made sure that the civ manager only has to parse the entry definitions once

- made planet screens refresh after removing or adding troops

- fixed numerous typos and spelling errors in various files

- changed it so that the difficulty on the OpponentWnd slider changes all of the selected races' intelligences

- changed it so that when you enable a race, it automatically sets its intelligence to be at the level of the difficulty

- Fixed bug where lines on Treaties screen would point off-screen if you were a custom race playing against 10 enemies

- D and T buttons will now toggle the details and rally point screens on/off instead of queuing up multiple instances of them

- Kills some battle related processes as soon as they are finished so they don't stay in memory when no longer needed

- When running in full screen mode (Release build), the mouse will be clipped to the game window to prevent accidentally clicking outside of the window. You can still use ALT+TAB to activate other windows.

- added function IsProtectedMiniFreighter to check for valid target

- added code to clear selected rallypoint from minimap to prevent crashing when the rallypoint is deleted

- Kills some battle related processes as soon as they are finished so they don't stay in memory when no longer needed

- AI will tend to try to "finish off" its enemies

- Changed difficulty to be based on the AVERAGE AI intelligence rather than the highest AI intelligence

- Torian AI significantly altered in what it builds on planets.

- Torian AI will raise taxes as long as morale is high

- Terran Alliance AI will lease less often (stunted early growth)

- Drengin will build more scouts to expand faster

- All AI will tend to mobilize for war now BEFORE going to war (i.e. start to send ships near the border rather than declare war and have months of phoney war. We have ideas on making it even better in the future.).

- Starbase modules give more boost earlier and less later as you add modules

- Fixed weird issue where AI would turn off social production between projects and then the AI would see that it has no social production and would then pick the cheapest (rather than the most appropriate) improvement to build which (wait for it) would tend to be economic improvements.

- Morale ability has more diminishing returns at the high end. It still is powerful but a 200% morale ability is not twice as good as a 100% morale ability.

- fixed error where Terrain query images + ship component thumbnails did not show up even if they were in the correct mod subfolder

- Tweaked the minimap where it didn't draw all of the ZOC

- fixed destination cursors not being visible after loading save game

- added checks to make sure that dead civs are ignored in the UP

- Added strings for moralists event

- fixed typo in Singularity Driver IV's name

- Removed redunant use of short civ name in battle messages in GNN

- changed FindShipInSensorRange to use a predicate function

- Sentry/Guard should work better now

- Made it so that clicking on a ship will not cancel guard/sentry

- changed it so that the ship list does not do a full update so often (should help move times)

- added option to not prompt to pay cost of a module if you have enough money in your treasury

- Changed missing turn button if a rallypoint is on an uninhabitable or uncolonized planet

- fixed bug where there was a 1 turn delay before ships would calc a new path after swapping rallypoint destinations from the governor

- fixed bug with trade screen where dialogs did not hide when switching civs

- fixed government bonus strings so that they now show the bonuses as implemented.

- updated ship designs that wasn't using correct ranges

- Re-did UI so that where clicking on the minimap couldn't accidently click on the find or turn buttons

- Updated calculation of alliance victory status string

- tweaked locale code so that it doesn't change so much, which should fix some performance issues and some crashes. Have verification that display and entry of German characters is working, but would like confirmation from other languages also.

- Changed auto-attack behavior; When a ship is set on auto-attack, it will attempt to find a nearby ship belonging to a civ it is at war with. If it can't find a ship that is not hidden by fow, it will cancel auto-attack to avoid causing the missing turn button bug. To avoid slowdown, it does not attempt to pick the 'best' target, it just picks the first valid target it finds.

- added additional debug messages to activation code

- Updated screen on OpponentWnd where the civ name was not using the displayname field.

- made rallypoint wnd sort rallypoint names alphabetically

- Terran Alliance should now start with the correct intelligence

- Addressed playability issue where the last non-custom race you played would be loaded when going to customize the custom race (You may get this the first time before you load the correct custom race config or clear the LastRace string under CustomRace in the Prefs.ini file)

- Changed Ctrl+B where hitting CTRL+N when playing a Custom Race started a new game using the default Custom Race config

- Fixed bug where planet quality and number of tiles did not match after choosing Neutral alignment

- Updated Invasion behavior to avoid invading a planet with a planetary bonus multiple times would cause more tiles to become available every invasion

- Added tool tip on planet screen

- Fixed bug where info icons would appear jumbled together at the top of the screen if there were too many. Now, new icons will fall as soon as the existing icons have been cleared.

- Improved the graphics management system for better compatibility

- Dead Civs no longer show up with voting power. We realize not counting dead people in voting makes game less realistic... JK.

- Fixed "Specialized Ships" stat on Foreign Stats/Military page to show correct number of ships

- Tweaked where starport icons on planets on main map were not updated after using the Civ Manager Governor to change what starports were building

- Changed behavior where first turn after loading a saved game would show a dip in the manufacturing history graph

- Updated Combat viewer to change where ship icons in combat viewer did not show the correct amount of damage if the civ had HP bonuses

- Fixed an API that made the AI like you more than they should

- Syncronized relations code that caused the AI and Human player relations to be out of sync

- Updated UI structs where intelligences were reset without updating difficulty level if you went back to a previous screen

- Made decomission of planetary improvements never take more than 1 turn.

- added code to make sure that decomission 'improvements' can't be built on empty or non-functional tiles

- Our system now suppports tab keysin entry fields

- added dialog to warn if you're using an invalid race config when playing a metaverse game

- fixed bug where starting a new game after having started/loaded a game and left the ship list open causes a crash or empty game screen

- added code to delete shipcfgs from My DocumentsMy GamesGalCiv2ships (or metaverseships) folder that do not have an xml file. This will help keep the folder clean and cut down on save game sizes (and time to save/load)

- rallypoints will no longer show up in the stacked ship context area, since they now show up in the context area in the bottom left corner of the main screen interface

- Fixed bug where sometimes, after an alt-tab, freighter ships would not appear to be the correct size.

- Fixed bug where planet quality penalties were applied in the case of an invasion that ended in a draw

- fixed crash on foreign report if no race has any ships

- fixed bug that didn't read in modded conversations or flavor text

- fixed bug where last custom race wasn't loaded

- Tweaked it so that tooltips will now show up for the lower row of ships in the Ships in Orbit

- fixed it so that if you select a ship in the Ships In Orbit area, it will deselect the previous one, even if it's in another row.

- SizeMods now use only the base capacity of the hull, not the max capacity (the capacity after miniturization is applied)

- Made changes to font manager to fix the slow-down on foreign language systems.

- Added option to disable city lights on the dark side of planets

- fleet upgrade overlays always update properly

- Tweaked ship weapons/defenses

- Tweaked more planetary improvements

- Changed the way planetary invasions penalties work when a draw (extremely rare)